Selection

Tag archives for Selection

The Genetics of Human Adaptation: Hard Sweeps, Soft Sweeps, and Polygenic Adaptation: There has long been interest in understanding the genetic basis of human adaptation. To what extent are phenotypic differences among human populations driven by natural selection? With the recent arrival of large genome-wide data sets on human variation, there is now unprecedented opportunity…

An interesting exchange in Nature on ways to conceptualize the evolution of virulence. First, Adaptation and the evolution of parasite virulence in a connected world: Adaptation is conventionally regarded as occurring at the level of the individual organism, where it functions to maximize the individual’s inclusive fitness…However, it has recently been argued that empirical studies…

A few days ago I discussed a new paper which explores the patterns of natural selection in the genome of the X chromosome. As you know the X is “carried” disproportionately by females, as males have only one copy, so it offers up an interesting window into evolutionary dynamics (see The Red Queen for a…

Update: Must read post from p-ter. A Composite of Multiple Signals Distinguishes Causal Variants in Regions of Positive Selection: The human genome contains hundreds of regions whose patterns of genetic variation indicate recent positive natural selection, yet for most the underlying gene and the advantageous mutation remain unknown. We developed a method, Composite of Multiple…

Well, I don’t quite know about that, but that’s the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females: Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of…

Haplotypic Background of a Private Allele at High Frequency in the Americas: Recently, the observation of a high-frequency private allele, the 9-repeat allele at microsatellite D9S1120, in all sampled Native American and Western Beringian populations has been interpreted as evidence that all modern Native Americans descend primarily from a single founding population. However, this inference…

Dan MacArthur already posted some of the supplementary figures from Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations, but he didn’t put up one that I thought was really striking. The text: First, there is extensive sharing of extreme iHS and XP-EHH signals between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia,…

Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece on a review on the relationships between male competition, signaling and sexual selection. If the topic interests you I strongly recommend Animal Signals, John Maynard Smith’s last book.

John Hawks & Daniel MacArthur have already pointed to a new paper in Genome Research, Signals of recent positive selection in a worldwide sample of human populations. As Dan notes, it’s Open Access, so you can read the PDF yourself. That being said, “Just read it!” might be somewhat a tall order if you don’t…